Why Local Businesses Can't Ignore AI Search
There is no denying that local business visibility through Google is now different from what it was two years back. There is a growing difference in those businesses which are aware of the changes and the ones that are optimising for the old formula used by Google to calculate the importance of a business in terms of local relevance. This difference is becoming more and more evident in the number of enquiries, the direction requests, and the number of calls which the businesses on the correct side of this difference are getting from searches where the other ones appear less frequently than expected. AI-powered Google Search has changed local visibility specifically through three mechanisms that interact with each other in ways that make any single one harder to isolate as the cause of a ranking shift than it would be if they were operating independently. The AI Overview Layer is making judgments about local classifications before the local pack and organic search results that ar...